Wednesday, January 23, 2013

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

The groundbreaking
decision by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta overturns a 1994 Pentagon
rule that restricts women from many positions in the infantry and
artillery, even though in reality women have found themselves in combat
in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When asked if they would be required to wear makeup and high heels while killing enemies, Panetta said it would depend on who they were killing. "Some cultures might find it insulting to be murdered by women dressed according to superior western fashion, but others might not mind."

Monday, January 21, 2013

Much nonsense has been written about the (mostly imaginary) glories of "free trade," with little mention of the fact that Adam Smith, supposedly the father of the doctrine, endorsed equality of outcome, was quite critical of joint stock companies (the impersonal stock exchange), and entertained business enterprises no larger than a pin factory employing two dozen workers. His critique of 18th century capitalism, far from being a justification for today's enormous centers of unaccountable private wealth, is actually an endorsement of self-organized, human scale markets accountable to the communities that host them, not vast impersonal "markets" dominated by transnational corporations and international banks. Furthermore, he did not sneer at moral judgment, as do today's champions of capitalist "freedom"; on the contrary, he felt that human nature contains a natural and appropriate concern for the well-being of others, and an obligation to not inflict harm on them. This led him to conclude that government had a responsibility to restrain those who failed to fulfill that obligation.

Much of what goes under the name of "trade" today would not be recognized as such by Adam Smith. A huge portion of it is composed of exchanges within the branches of individual transnational corporations, which is to say that it consists of individual corporations shipping components between its various branches. This is done primarily to get around market discipline, not to submit to it.

Transnational corporations shed taxes by overcharging themselves for “inputs” they transfer from “foreign” affiliates and escape government regulation by shifting production to high-repression, low-wage regions of the world, declaring less profits at “home” and more in tax havens abroad. Through publicly-financed merger mania, they buy off competition, mock social responsibility, bid down wages, and restrict consumer choice to those options that directly enrich them. With amazing chutzpah they then defend their monopolies as “rugged individualism,” demanding subsidies for their inefficiencies, protection against competition, guarantees of their credit, coverage of their losses, and bailouts for their bankruptcies. They devote more money and effort to manipulating people into compulsively buying than they do to making things worth purchasing. They borrow billions of dollars to finance mergers and leveraged buyouts, deducting the interest while eliminating the jobs of the taxpayers from whom they borrow. In spite of their pious rhetoric about the need to "support business," they make enterprising small business virtually impossible. As the U.S. Trade Commission noted back in the 1980s, the nearest thing to a Communist command economy is in the front offices of transnational corporations.

While sneering at the "Nanny State," no sector of society is more dependent on it than transnational corporations. Corporate managers in advanced industries like electronics, computers, and pharmaceuticals, insist that the government, which means the taxpayers, absorb the unprofitable parts of the production process, namely research and development. Furthermore, corporate elites require that the public, through the Pentagon, provide a state guaranteed market, which is needed for waste production if commercial markets don’t work, as they often don't. When something is commercially viable, it is sold, and when not, the public purchases it and destroys it. The public pays the costs and the corporation keeps the profit - that's capitalism. And Adam Smith would not have supported it.

One fundamental tenet of “free trade” theory is that public subsidies are not allowed. However, following WWII U.S. business leaders were convinced that the U.S. economy would collapse back into depression without state intervention. They warned that advanced industry, specifically aircraft, “cannot satisfactorily exist in a pure, competitive, unsubsidized, ‘free enterprise’ economy” and that “the government is their only possible savior.” (There are very few "Ma and Pa" aerospace firms - ed.) Corporate leaders also accepted that the Pentagon system would be the best way to shift production costs to the public. Social spending dedicated to promoting the general welfare could also have played the “pump priming” stimulative role, but that route would not have provided a direct subsidy to the corporate sector, and it also would have brought unwelcome tendencies toward public participation in decision-making about how best to invest public money. Military spending had none of these defects, and was adopted precisely for this reason.

Six decades later the private industrial sector continues to be heavily dependent on taxpayer help, with all key industries heavily subsidized: aerospace, automotive, electronics, agribusiness, automation, biotechnology, communications, pharmaceuticals, just about every dynamic sector of the economy.

Interestingly, American political attitudes very much contradict the “devil-take-the-hindmost” philosophy of “free trade," which favors those best situated to win the competition, namely large, transnational corporations. Overwhelming majorities of Americans favor federal guarantees of public assistance for those who can’t work, unemployment insurance, subsidized prescription drugs and nursing home care for the elderly, at least minimum health care, social security, and federally guaranteed child care for low-income working mothers. The persistence of such attitudes in the wake of massive corporate propaganda repeatedly announcing the “death” of the New Deal is striking.

Because monopoly and public interests diverge, corporate expenditures on the systematic manipulation of public attitudes are huge in the United States. They reached one trillion dollars annually by the late 1990s, and have continued to climb since. Many of these expenditures are tax deductible, so that the American people pay for the privilege of being indoctrinated by corporations sucking at the public tit while denouncing ordinary Americans for depending on the “Nanny State” when they receive far more modest help from their government. The main thrust of this propaganda offensive is that liberty is the right to waste, over-consumption is impossible, and poverty is self-inflicted.

Internationally, "free trade" elevates “property rights” to Divine status, superseding every other established right among nations of the world. In many ways it is simply a bludgeon used to force the poor to subsidize the rich, as all of the industrialized nations got that way through disciplined protectionism, not market discipline, which is the only way known to enter the competition against better established rivals. By now the more powerful states have elevated transnational corporations over the sovereign power of nation states, which have the defect of being occasionally responsive to democratic demands. As political scientist Michael Parenti observes, “free trade” arrangements like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) represent a kind of global coup d’etat by the giant business interests of the world.

Free trade agreements grant anonymous international trade committees the authority to overrule any nation-state laws that are deemed a burden to the investment opportunities of transnational corporations. Meeting in secret, these all-powerful trade panels often have investment stakes in the very issues they are seeking to adjudicate - and they have been elected by no one. Their function is simply to grant carte-blanche to transnational corporations headquartered in countries all over the world. Governments are commanded to reduce tariffs, terminate farm subsidies, treat foreign corporations the same as domestic ones, honor all transnational corporate patent claims on natural resources, and obey the rulings of the WTO's permanent elite bureaucracy. Should a country attempt to resist changes to its laws designed to accommodate the lords of “free trade,” the WTO may impose fines or international trade sanctions, depriving the resisting country of needed markets and materials.

What kind of government policies face "free trade" sanctions? Michael Parenti writes: “The WTO has ruled against laws deemed barriers to free trade . . . has forced Japan to accept greater pesticide residues in imported food . . . has kept Guatemala from outlawing deceptive advertising of baby food . . . has eliminated the ban that various countries had imposed on asbestos and on fuel and emission standards for motor vehicles . . . and . . . has ruled against marine-life protection laws and the ban some nations imposed on the importation of endangered-species products . . . The European Union banned the importation of hormone-ridden US beef . . . a three-member WTO panel decided the ban was an illegal restraint on trade . . . The WTO overturned a portion of the US Clean Air Act banning certain additives in gasoline because it interfered with imports from foreign refineries, along with a portion of the US Endangered Species Act that forbade the import of shrimp caught with nets that failed to protect sea turtles.”

All of these rulings promote minority interests over the general public interest.

Friday, January 11, 2013

The new program will make it seem that spending on public
and social programs is increasing even while it is being further cut while
aiding financial markets through a new “circum-sequestration” model which will
spend even more for israel and even less on America using the
“simulate-stimulate” accounting technique to aid in consumer commodity
consumption without any money or credit.

“With proper
advertising mind management techniques and psycho-mass massaging consciousness
control, we can assure continued economic growth even while losing more money by
the microsecond” said new FedHead Ernie Madoff, who is really not related to
Bernie Madoff, he insists.

Several minority - identity groups have threatened to sue
the radical director for not including them in his latest hit.

“This is an
artistic hate crime” said Julio Messerschmitt, spokesperson for German Latinos
United “ and we will take this all the way to the Supreme Court if we can't get
a hearing in Small Claims.”

When asked how he gets away with using such derogatory hate
crime labels for minorities in his films, Quarantino replied " I always employ
enough nigger, spic, faggot, kike and raghead actors to overcome any problems
with the politically correct people. This is America and the fucking free
market rules and you get what you fucking pay for. In this fucking business, if
you’re economically fucking correct, you can screw fucking politics.”

Hollywood has nominated Quarantino for an Oscar in the “Best
Fucking Director” category. One of his favorite actors, Hamuel Johnson, has
called Quarantino “the best
motherfucking director in the history of this cocksucking industry, and you
faggot critics can quote me on that.”

Saturday, January 5, 2013

“As the business of the country has learned the secret of combination, it is gradually subverting the power of the politician and rendering him subservient to its purposes.”

—------Bankers’ Magazine, 1901

During the 1900-1916 period,” writes political scientist Michael Parenti, “federal price and market regulations in meat packing, food and drugs, banking, timber, and mining were initiated at the insistence of the strongest companies within these industries. The overall effect was to raise profits for the larger producers, tighten their control over markets, and weed out smaller competitors.”

This era came to be called Progressive because of the much celebrated but largely ineffective legislation enacted to control these corporate monopolies: the Sixteenth Amendment, allowing for a progressive income tax; the Seventeenth Amendment, providing for the direct popular election of Senators; and electoral reforms like the long ballot and the nonpartisan election. By 1915, many states had also passed laws limiting the length of the workday and establishing worker’s compensation for industrial accidents. A handful of states had established minimum wage laws and 38 had implemented child labor restrictions. In a few industries workers won the 8-hour day and time-and-a-half pay for overtime.

Though ordinary Americans benefited to some degree from the reforms, historian Gabriel Kolko, a careful student of the period, characterizes these years as “consistently conservative.” Large corporations, not a reformist public, were the dominant force. Observes Kolko: “The pervasive reality of the period is big business’ control of politics set in the context of the political regulation of the economy.”

What did big business want? An absolute priority was the Open Shop (no unions), which would guarantee that conditions for labor remained poor and workers subordinate. Employers’ associations were not shy about asserting their authoritarian vision, perfecting the Open Shop by boycotting union goods, providing financial and other help to businesses trying to ban unions, furnishing strikebreakers, boycotting unfriendly newspapers, bribing union officials, blacklisting union workers, hiring labor spies, forcing workers to sign oaths renouncing union associations, spreading anti-union propaganda, using police, militia, and private goon squads to break strikes, petitioning the courts to cripple unions, and organizing business lobbies to strangle labor legislation.

All this proved to be quite effective in subduing workers. In 1914, labor’s purchasing power was less than it had been in the 1890s, and according to government statistics, two million children were in the marketplace simply to help their families survive. Millions of workers toiled 12 to 14 hours a day for six or seven days a week, without being able to keep their families fed. At the same time, 35,000 a year were killed on the job and another 700,000 were victims of injury, illness, blindness or other work-related afflictions. Such is the price of "personal liberty" under capitalism.

Helping place such conditions virtually beyond remedy was a redefinition of the corporation making it not merely an artificial creation of the state but a voluntary contract among private persons. Some were bold enough to designate it an “organic entity,” part of nature, and therefore not subject to control even by its owners. “Over and over again,” notes Harvard legal historian Morton Horwitz, “legal theorists attempted to find a vocabulary that would enable them to describe the corporation as a real or natural entity whose existence is prior to and separate from the state.” A series of dubious court decisions by radical judicial activists institutionalized this view, allowing corporations to evolve extraordinary powers under the guise of "individual" Constitutional rights - as immortal persons.

With their harrowing cycles of boom, bust, panic, and collapse, largely unregulated markets had produced such a string of catastrophes that even big business had become convinced a completely free market would doom profits and perhaps even society itself. Therefore, the captains of industry pushed to have corporations invested with the rights of flesh and blood persons, allowing them to transfer public power into private hands and administer markets along highly authoritarian lines. The corporate right of free speech was a bonanza, allowing corporations to bombard the public with commercial propaganda, to buy elections, and to relentlessly promote the glories of an acquisitive life. Convinced that control of production rightfully belonged in their hands, workers bitterly condemned these developments, but were unable to wrest control from the corporations.

The "progressive" regulation movement arose from the corporations’ “natural” need to have the government do for them what they were unable to do for themselves. “National regulation,” argues Kolko, reflected corporate efforts “to find political means to resolve the economic problems which economic decentralization, competition, and a whole panoply of new challenges made endemic to American capitalism.” A longstanding problem was price war, which an aggressive series of corporate mergers had been unable to stop. In fact, quite the contrary. In 1900, The Iron Age commented that “the great industrial aggregations, instead of discouraging competition, have rather encouraged it,” while the New York Financier opined that, “The most serious problem that confronts trust combinations today is competition from independent sources...the sources of production are being multiplied, with a resultant decrease in profits . . .” The private sector therefore demanded government intervention to limit competition and bring harmony to the chaos of conflicting regulations passed by dozens of state governments. With business yearning for stable competition and a predictable national market, even the likes of J. P. Morgan partner Henry P. Davison repudiated laissez-faire in no uncertain terms: “I would rather have regulation and control than free competition.”

In short, observes Kolko, “Progressivism was not the triumph of small business over the trusts, but the victory of big businesses in achieving the rationalization of the economy that only the federal government could provide.” Had a business-friendly apparatus not been established, a rising socialist movement stood prepared to shift the goals of production from profit to social utility. With the stakes so high utilities magnate Samuel Insull observed that it was in business’s interest to “help shape the right kind of regulation than to have the wrong kind forced upon [us].” The “right” kind limited competition while placing capital accumulation beyond discussion.

Contrary to popular belief, the presidents of the Progressive Era were faithful servants of the large corporation. Teddy Roosevelt, whose reputation as a “trust buster” stemmed from his sporadic rhetorical eruptions against the “malefactors of great wealth,” actually governed by looking out for their interests. He condemned reformers as “muckrakers,” as though there were something underhanded in exposing injustice, and consistently criticized “sinister demagogs and foolish visionaries” for “seek[ing] to incite a violent class hatred against all men of wealth.” The idea that the economic structure itself might be generating legitimate class resentments was quite beyond TR’s grasp. According to historian Richard Hofstadter, he was “generally hostile” to labor and dismissed the Populists as “crude and ignorant.” In 1895, he had recommended that progressive criminologist John Altgeld and socialist Eugene Debs be “placed before a stone wall and shot.”

Speaking loudly and carrying a small stick, TR displayed a consistently cooperative attitude towards Wall Street, enjoying warm relations with industrial magnates and inviting them to serve in his government. He posed no great challenge to capital during his two terms, which was not surprising since his principal advisors were key figures in the world of industrial and finance capital: Mark Hanna, Robert Bacon, and George W. Perkins of the House of Morgan, and Elihu Root, Senator Nelson Aldrich, and James Stillman of the Rockefeller interests. TR actually prosecuted fewer anti-trust cases, substantially fewer, than did the Harding or Taft Administrations and negotiated a “gentleman’s agreement” with two J. P. Morgan men—Elbert Gary and George Perkins—which guaranteed the legality of their companies in return for their cooperation in any investigation carried out by the Bureau of Corporations. His prosecution of the Morgan railroad monopoly in the Northern Securities case changed nothing, since the key figures in planning the monopoly (Morgan, Harriman, and Hill) suffered no prosecution. The motive for this famous anti-trust action was not to cure the injustices of capitalism, but to head off calls for government ownership of the railroads.

Like most reformers, TR did not oppose the structural evils inherent in a predatory economy, but rather, the occasions of “mismanagement” that bred disrespect for business and thereby undermined its credibility. Thus, he restricted himself to blaming individual corporate leaders, not monopoly capitalism: “The line of demarcation we must draw must always be on conduct, not on wealth; our objection to any given corporation must be, not that it is big, but that it behaves badly.” In a Message to Congress on December 6, 1904, TR summed up his favorable view of autocratic business power: “Great corporations are necessary, and only men of great and singular mental power can manage such corporations successfully, and such men must have great rewards.”

William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson offered no better approach, with neither perceiving any “fundamental conflict between their political goals and those of business.” Like TR, Wilson focused on individual, not social abuses, assailing corrupt political machines and big trusts. But his campaign funds came from a handful of wealthy backers, and he worked cooperatively with associates of the Rockefeller and Morgan empires, showing himself as faithful to advancing the interests of big business as his counterparts in the GOP. In January 1912, Wilson said: “I am not afraid of any corporation, no matter how big. I am afraid of any corporation, however small, that is bad, that is rotten at the core, whose practices and actions are in restraint of trade.” When told that this sounded almost identical to Teddy Roosevelt’s sentiments, Wilson responded: “When I sit down and compare my views with those of a Progressive Republican I can’t see what the difference is, except that he has a sort of pious feeling about the doctrine of protection, which I have never felt.”

The focus of Wilson’s “New Freedom” was therefore not the distribution and control of class power but the ease of market entry for small business. Wilson was interested in equalizing exploitation rights, not questioning their validity. He assumed, as Roosevelt had before him, that businessmen were well-intentioned and desired the public good, and therefore he sought merely to strengthen their allegedly altruistic tendencies. He suspected no causal connection between the concentration of wealth in private hands and the widespread lack of political democracy.